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Mars Tonight - 23 November 2007

asteria

By asteria
in Observing - Planetary

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asteria

asteria

Posted
Posted

Hi there - I've just been out with the 150mm MAK trying to get a view of Mars. I've tracked it from about 9PM. Very shaky when low in the sky, but seeing settled around 10PM and improved over the last hour. Best view seemed to be with the 15mm Plossl (120x) plus #21 Orange filter (46% transmission). With this and settled air I could make out dark maria and other very subtle markings. The northern (?) pole definitely seemed to be more reflective, suggesting the polar ice cap. The image was reasonably sharp with good seeing.

Pushing things to the 9mm (200x) Plossl with the filter didn't seem to improve detail although the image obviously magnified. Later in the evening I could even get a reasonable image in the 6mm (300x) with a fairly sharp, defined planetary disc and some markings. With more altitude, and better seeing, this higher magnification seemed to work OK.

Towards one side of Mars there was a very small starlike point of light. At first I thought this was probably a faint star. However, I wonder whether it wasn't one of the moons of Mars. It was difficult to pick out with a filtered eyepiece, except with averted vision. However, towards the later part of the evening, with the unfiltered 15mm eyepiece it was somewhat clearer. I've read that these moons are hard to see with a backyard scope, so it was probably a star, but does anyone have an answer - Phobos, Deimos or faint star! Using Redshift, it suggested 12.8 mag Deimos.

Best wishes to all

Ed

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barkis

barkis

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Posted

You could make a sketch showing yourself the position of the body relative to the planet, and check again a few hours later. Mars little moons move fairly quickly around the planet, and that would be discernible, if indeed what you saw was a martian moon. I doubt if it was, they would be very close in, and the bright light from mars would probably drown them out. We are talking separations of only arc seconds, so if the object you suspect as a moon is more than 15 arc seconds from the planet, then it is most certainly not what you suspected.

Ron.

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lunator

lunator

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Ed

I have spent about an hour observing Mars.

The seeing was excellent and I was able to use x400 mag. I even tried x600 and this ok for very brief periods.

I didn't see any close object to Mars but I hope you solve your mystery. :(

Cheers

Ian

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asteria

asteria

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Hi there - thanks for the pointers. Having thought about this, it can't Deimos. I reckon the 'star' was probably about 2-3 planet diameters from Mars. With a diameter for around 14.5", this would give a distance from the planet of a minimum of 30", outside of the limits described by Ron. Also, the Moon was very bright and I guess this would have drowned out light from such a dim object anyway.

Of course, when I went out again after typing the report, I couldn't find the damn thing anyway, but I guess my night vision might have gone, although I only had the light of the LCD screen on, and no interior lights. I did get quite a bit of frost on the scope, dew shield, finder etc, so this is a badge of honour, even though the moon of Mars was not to be!

This AM - took a quick peek at Mars again, and then focussed on Saturn. However, was observing through the cool down time, so seeing was a bit disturbed. When quiet, good banding and shadow of the rings on the planet. Titan quite clear until the sky got too bright around 7AM.

Time for a cup of tea!

:saturn:

Ed

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asteria

asteria

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Thanks for the response D25! It's useful to have your estimate of magnitude for the star. It was very dim in my scope, just at the margins of visibility. The features I described were difficult to pick out, but I am pretty sure they were genuine! By the way - here's my basic question of the day: does the MAK, with star diagonal and eyepiece, simply reverse the image, or does it also invert it. I was trying to work out which way the polar axis was pointing but my brain was too cold to sort it out.

Best wishes. Ed

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